Heretofore, conventional off-line and on-line problem solving techniques have been fraught with limitations. Conventional wisdom and prior research on problem solving has traditionally held that that the effectiveness of group problem solving decreases as the number of people in the group increases. Although groups may be useful for brainstorming, for reviewing ideas and documents, and division of labor, it is generally agreed that coordination and communication problems increase exponentially with the size of the group.
Simply coordinating the calendars of many people working on a common problem, set of problems, or project can prove a major obstacle unless (as in the case of the military) there is an absolute authority that can demand people conform to a particular schedule. Simple math shows that if even if there is a 90% chance that a given meeting time is good for each particular person involved, there is only about one chance in three that a particular meeting time will work if ten people are involved (0.910=0.34).
What applies to scheduling, also applies to communication. Again, if ten people meet, and even if each has a 90% chance of making comments that keep the meeting on track and only a 10% chance of making a tangential comment that side-tracks the meeting, there is still a two-thirds chance that the meeting will be side-tracked. As more meeting participants are added, the situation only gets worse.
With forty-five people participating, again assuming a 10% chance of an off-track comment or schedule conflict per person, there is more than a 99% chance that a scheduled meeting time will not work for someone or that the meeting will be sidetracked even if the group does manage to get together.
These simple mathematical facts are a major reason why some organizations try to keep teams small. If large numbers of people are involved—it very quickly becomes nearly impossible to get anything done.
On the other hand, teams and even large teams of people do have advantages. A primary advantage is summed up by the adage: two heads are better than one. With more people, comes more expertise. And research in problem solving has shown that the availability of relevant expertise is a major factor in coming up with good problem solutions.
Conventional wisdom and prior research on problem solving has therefore established that while small teams may be useful in cases where additional relevant expertise is desirable, the coordination and communication problems inherent in a concurrent team approach makes large teams impractical.
Offline technology such as conference calls on the telephone, video-conferencing, jet travel, and the like, has made it somewhat easier to schedule group work, but as long as the group members must all work together at the same time, the limitations described above cannot be avoided.
Conventional on-line problem solving systems and methods also have limitations. Such online technology systems, ranging from E-mail to groupware and collaborative problem solving systems such as Lotus Notes and other web based systems, represent a great advance over offline problem solving technology, primarily because they allow asynchronous work. For example, with E-mail, group members can exchange ideas without having to both be available for a phone call at the same time. Each group member can work on his or her own schedule—asynchronously.
Unfortunately, even though the scheduling problems are somewhat ameliorated by asynchronous offline technologies such as E-mail, the problem of getting off-track as the number of team members increases still exists. In addition, online technologies such as E-mail can easily lead to information overload—something most of us have experienced when we come to work and confront dozens (or sometimes even hundreds) of E-mail messages waiting for us when we return to our workplace.
Structure has been added to E-mail programs to allow users to sort E-mail and categorize it—even to add rules to automatically accept or reject messages. But little has been done with E-mail to facilitate group problem solving specifically. Those systems that do target collaborative work focus on small groups or teams. The software basically attempts to duplicate the same sorts of things that take place in regular conventional offline problem-solving groups—only with the added capability of allowing members to work asynchronously as well as synchronously, and with the capabilities to exchange documents and information online.
E-mail and groupware thus make problem solving somewhat more efficient and easier to conduct across geographically dispersed groups, but little has been done to support problem solving by large groups of people. Specifically, substantially all the same communication and coordination problems exist when large groups are involved.
Some groupware attempts to overcome some of these coordination problems via process or project management techniques that result in very structured flows on work. For example, with Lotus Notes it is possible to design document management and workflow solutions that route documents from person to person in a very structured way. However, most Notes applications allow only one person at a time to change the documents. If large numbers of people were allowed to simultaneously modify Notes documents, chaos would rapidly ensue since there is no capability in the product to organize revisions by large numbers of simultaneous users.
Similarly, the WEBDAV protocol, which represents state-of-the-art technology for web-based collaborative authoring—and which has been adopted by Microsoft, Adobe, and other companies to enable their existing applications (for example, Microsoft Word) for collaborative work—allows only one user at a time to modify a document.
Those systems that do allow multiple users to change the same document simultaneously are designed for small groups of people working carefully in different places to avoid the situation of one person undoing someone else's revisions.
In short, traditional online groupware applications are currently unable to effectively manage the simultaneous editing of many individuals much less support more sophisticated types of large-scale problem-solving efforts.
The Threaded Discussion Group (TDG) represents another standard tool that has emerged for exchange between many individuals. A threaded discussion group is an example of a tree structure. Discussion group software allows people to post questions on a website. Other people can read these posted questions and respond with answers or relevant ideas of their own.
To keep track of the proliferation of questions, answers, and other ideas that people post, software has been developed that organizes people's posting according to a tree-structure, where each major topic in the community discussion corresponds to a branch in the tree. As more topics, also known as threads, are added to the discussion, the tree structure adds more branches to track them. Discussion groups or bulletin boards that make use of threads are called Threaded Discussion Groups (TDGs).
Recently a variety of websites have come into being that use TDGs, E-mail, and/or other existing online tools to try to provide answers to people with simple questions about a wide range of subjects. For example, the site ASKME.com offers advice on subjects as diverse as UFOs and computer programming. Many other sites exist, all using variants of the same or similar technology, that specialize in offering advice in different areas, and with different business models—ranging from free advice in return for watching advertising to charging a fee for connecting advice seekers with advice givers, who then solve or attempt to solve the problem or give advice offline using conventional approaches.
Many of these online Question and Answer (Q&A) services use TDGs as one means for posting advice. A major advantage of this tree structure is that it organizes the online posts in a hierarchical way, which makes it easier for people to follow the exchange of ideas. The use of tree-structures as data structures that offer an efficient way of organizing information is well known in the field of computer science. Since computer scientists invented online bulletin board systems in the early days of the Internet, it is not surprising that tree-like structures were used to organize the exchange of ideas.
As Q&A sites are the closest existing technology to an asynchronous online problem solving system that allows easy access to a wide variety of experts, the following discussion primarily focuses on the current limitations of these systems.
What all existing Q&A sites have in common is that they are able to answer only relatively simple questions. If a problem requires multiple steps to solve, or expertise from multiple experts, users are forced to submit a series of questions which is very inefficient and time consuming. The net result is that Q&A sites are used for simple, quick answers. If more complicated problem solving is required, users typically try to work with experts offline.
In fact, some of the Q&A sites have built their business around this existing technology limitation. For example, EXP.COM specializes in matching people seeking advice with experts who provide bids and then do most of their work offline. This business model is based on the fact that currently there is no good way to solve complicated, multi-step problems online—which is why the brokering approach seems attractive.
While TDGs are a powerful technology that facilitates simple online Q&A services, known conventional software which displays and organizes the ideas of people who post information online, suffer from a number of disadvantages that limits the utility and effectiveness of such systems and methods. Some major disadvantages include the following: (1) Existing online tools and systems that are accessible by large numbers of experts, cannot support complex, multi-step problem solving. (2) Existing online tools and systems that can reach large numbers of experts, do a poor job of integrating the work of multiple experts—especially if these experts do not know each other, and have never worked together before. (3) Existing online tools and systems all suffer from the disadvantages that affect all forms of offline and online problem solving to date, namely that communication and coordination problems increase and quickly become intractable as the number of participants increases.
Some of the reasons that these disadvantages exist in current systems (and especially in TDGs which heretofore represent the best known approach to online problem solving that is open to many experts) are summarized immediately below. First, discussions frequently get off track as people express tangential opinions. Second, the amount of information displayed can quickly become overwhelming and take too long to read. Third, people often post repetitive information, which is inefficient and adds to the burden of others trying to find new relevant information. Fourth, people with problems have no way of ensuring that online experts will check the bulletin board in time for the answers to be useful to them. Similarly, experts trying to build off of other experts' work don't know how long they will have to wait before they can proceed. Fifth, the likelihood of solving a problem tends to decrease multiplicatively with the number of information exchanges required to solve the problem because the first four factors each reduce the probability of successfully completing each information exchange step. Sixth, the likelihood of solving a problem tends to decrease multiplicatively with the number of experts required to solve the problem because the first four factors each reduce the probability that a given expert will participate. Seventh, misinformation can be spread by the system because there is no efficient method for controlling the quality and accuracy of the information posted by experts. In particular, rating systems from the question posters, which have been employed by some online information exchanges, have limited effectiveness at quality control because the very fact that the questioner is asking a question suggests that the questioner lacks a particular type of expertise—that, after all, is why she/he is asking the question. Eighth, a large quantity of time is typically required of a SYSOP or other human moderator in order to ensure that the local rules of TDG are followed, and in order to organize and trim the tree structure so that the information exchange remains usable. This list of factors is only exemplary and does not identify all of the reasons for the failure or limitations of conventional systems and methods.
Slashdot.org is an example of the state-of-the-art technology for reducing irrelevant information on discussion boards. Slashdot asks its trusted users to rate the postings of other users. Users can then specify whether they would like to see all the postings, or only those postings with a rating above a specific cut-off number. Although Slashdot (and similar sites such as, for example, Kuro5hin.org and advogato.org) use ratings to try to filter information, none of these sites are designed specifically to support problem solving and do not use ratings as a mechanism for directing the flow of problem solving activity.
Therefore, there remains a need for system and method that overcome the problems and limitations present in conventional approaches.